Word: maleness
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...while Hollywood is being honest about the new strain of guy-meets-guy comedy - bromance, the word writer Dave Carnie coined to describe the strong emotional attachment of one man for another - maybe Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler should come out of the closet too. In Ferrell's movies, male merging beats female interest to a pulp, and his latest, Blades of Glory, allows him several opportunities to stick his face in Jon Heder's crotch. Sandler's summer hit, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, took guy-guy friendship to its logical conclusion: two firefighters get married. At least...
...there may be one more border to cross. When Apatow appeared last week on The Colbert Report, and was asked what was possibly left to show in male comedies, he instantly answered, "A penis." I don't doubt that Apatow was speaking ironically, yet there was self-revelation there to, since that's exactly the sexual organ that the fellows in Knocked Up and Superbad (and his earlier The 40-Year-Old Virgin) are most obsessed...
...penis is puzzled in Portnoy's Complaint, as Alexander Portnoy's shrink believes, in Superbad it is thoroughly, stunningly clueless and as violently tremulous as a divining rod at Hoover Dam." (Congrats to Manohla, by the way, for getting shrink and penis into the same sentence.) The token male critic I consulted, Joe Morgenstern of the Wall Street Journal, was just as enthusiastic: this "bawdy, big-hearted" comedy is a "canny evocation of male friendship in all its richness and complexity." It's as if all these worthy scribes have the rapture, and I'm left behind...
...caveats, then, before I go ranting on like the crank at the christening. I'm not a prude. I enjoy a good dirty joke, including more than a few in Knocked Up and Superbad. In my time I've praised ribald comedies (Clerks comes immediately to mind) and male-bonding frolics (Sideways). I don't mind the Apatow movies; I'm not trying to make anyone feel guilty for liking them more than I do. I just wonder why they've become the template for popular and critically acclaimed comedy, and why guy-guy is just about the only kind...
Although it's easy to minimize the impact of the women's coaching shortage--for example, fathers often introduce young girls to sports and remain active in their athletic development, so many female college players say they prefer playing for a male coach--here's why we shouldn't: most student athletes spend more time with their coach than with any other adult at school. Many coaches wield enormous influence on campus and in their communities. So what message is being sent to young women when men fill most of these leadership roles? "Their own expectations, their own aspirations...